Brand refresh & evolution
• Scaled Contentful from a $300M developer-focused B2D brand to a $3.0B enterprise-focused B2B brand
• Built a talented team of full-time and freelance designers, including illustrators, animators, and visual designers
• Created systems and guidelines to ensure brand consistency across the organization
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Creative director, team lead
ORIGINAL
Contentful was originally a developer-focused brand, so their website was geared towards that audience. When I joined the company, they were just starting to turn their attention towards the enterprise market and knew that they need to evolve into an enterprise brand. The main goals we wanted to achieve with our initial refresh were: (1) to create a distinct brand identity, (2) have that brand represented in a consistent manner across all our assets.
Contentful’s original brand has issues with ADA compliance, and well as inconsistency between assets like illustration and icons.
2. ITERATION
With a new company mission set around “modernizing the way content flows,” my first step was to craft a set of brand guidelines based on the new company direction. This initial brand refresh was built in three months, with only $15k and one freelance designer. While I led the effort, the refresh was created in collaboration with our Product Design, Marketing, Content, and Employer branding teams. As a team, we defined our brand pillars and the personality traits we believed best reflected the Contentful brand: authentic, fresh, focused, and warm.
With a new extended color palette and guiding principles, we worked on distinguishing our brand with eye-catching illustrations. I worked with developers to implement the new brand on the website. With my freelance team, we were able to scale the quantity and quality of assets to accelerate the business – the company closed their Series E at ~2.5x valuation versus the previous round.
As the brand begins to form, we wanted to create a bridge between the developer and enterprise worlds. During this stage, our illustrations are colorful and a little bit quirky – a nod to our start-up roots and developer audience.
3. EVOLUTION
The brand continued to mature and develop as my team grew to five (two FTE + three freelancers). We simplified our wave-like shapes and brightened our colors for even better contrast and accessibility. We added more definition to our brand guidelines to ensure consistency across the brand as the company grew. One way we did this was via a new brand portal, a project you can view in more detail here.
All the while, we stayed true to the brand identity pillars we had created (authentic, fresh, focused, and warm), with the result being a brand that was both distinctive and consistent, thus achieving the two main goals we had laid out for ourselves in the beginning of this brand journey. In July 2021, the company closed their most recent round of funding, putting its valuation at ~$3B.
The result is a distinct, consistent, enterprise-level brand with the ability to grow as the company scales